


Playable Character, Not Max Payne

by ButterflyGhost



Series: Playable Character [2]
Category: The Shield, due South
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2020-02-16 00:27:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18680386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ButterflyGhost/pseuds/ButterflyGhost
Summary: Ray Vecchio is too stupid to live. No wonder the Feds keep picking on him.





	Playable Character, Not Max Payne

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DoctorBane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DoctorBane/gifts).



Oh, great. Fucking great. Here is Ray, trying to keep a nice low profile, and what happens? He gets caught in the middle of a fucking drive-by shooting. It's so damn stupid, it could only happen to him.

 

On the other side of the wall he hears the shots fired. For an instant he forgets himself and starts to act like a cop, pulls out his gun and gets ready to announce himself - then he stops.

 

_Shit._

 

What’s the point of him trying to arrest them? They’re killing each other. Ray knows these guys - well, not _these_ guys, but he knows killers. Killers are all the same. The kind of people who gun someone down at a carwash aren’t going to surrender to a single policeman. He’s not Benny, he’s not even Armando anymore. Nobody respects him, nobody fears him. Nobody even notices him. That's how it has to be. Bad guys don’t just drop their guns for him. If Ray tries to stop them he’ll get shot, for fuck’s sake.

 

 _When did that ever stop me?_ There is a flash of pain, radiating out from the scar tissue in his chest. It flares up at inconvenient moments like this. Ray’s not an idiot: he knows it’s psychosomatic. Mostly.

 

For a second Ray starts to edge along the wall again, even knowing that it’s pointless. He doesn’t have a partner at his back, but he can feel the ghost of them - Kowalski with his geek glasses and freakishly good aim, or Benny pretending to be Canadian Superman with superhuman powers of persuasion. Who’s Ray pretending to be?

 

 _‘Whatever you do,’_ Kowalski told him, before he went under, _‘stay invisible. You’re going in there investigating a bunch of idiots who think they’re action heroes - I know the type. They think they’re Max Payne or something.’_

 

 _‘Max Payne?’_ Benny affected concern, though he had obviously watched Ray and Kowalski playing video games long enough to catch the reference. _‘That sounds uncomfortable.’_

 

Ray rolled his eyes and played along with Benny’s schtick. _‘What Kowalski is saying is that my job is to be a nobody, nonentity. Let the guys I’m investigating show off all they like. The more they run around thinking the story is all about them the more they dig themselves in.’_

 

 _‘Yeah,’_ Kowalski nodded his approval. _‘Let them run around being the central character in their own dramas. You just let them get on with it, don’t even be a sidekick. You’re just an extra.’_

 

Ray bristled a little at that, but before he could say anything Kowalski’s eyes went soft and amused; his mouth twisted in a sad smile. _‘Not to us though,’_ he said, which made everything better, then reached out to squeeze Ray’s shoulder.

 

 _‘Ray’s right,’_ Benny concurred. _‘Never to us.’_

 

And that’s what stops Ray, here at the carwash. That’s what keeps him hiding behind the wall.

 

Because _Ray_ \- Ray Vecchio - would have turned the corner and got himself shot trying to stop that murdering dickhead. That’s why Ray Vecchio has been shot twice and blown up once. Because he bitches about it, but he goes around corners, doesn't cut them. Not on this. Not when there's shots fired. Because Ray Vecchio is apparently too stupid to live.

 

No wonder the Feds keep picking on him.

 

So, today, Ray is in the right job, wrong place, wrong badge. Ray is not Ray today. Hasn’t been for months now. Yes, he’s a policeman, but he’s not _that_ policeman. Not the kind of policeman who would get shot at a carwash trying to stop an armed felon. No, today Ray is Steve Billings. He’s a cop, but he’s an invisible cop. The guy who bumbles around the station and nobody sees him. Ray’s been working very hard at that. Dammit, he’d been _so_ good at that. The Feds planted him in so quietly, and he settled in so well that nobody else would even have been able to say exactly when he started. He was just there one day. A fixture, like a potted plant or water cooler. ‘Oh, that’s just Billings.’

 

Not ‘oh, that’s Billings. You hear what happened at that drive in shooting?’

 

Ray closes his eyes. Fuck it. It had been the perfect insertion. He’d slipped in smooth, ruffled not a single fucking feather. He'd been the invisible man. And now this.

 

He steps back, and feels himself cave a little inside. He’s going to have to call this in, but he’s going to have to stay anonymous at the same time. And he’s going to have to pray that he _stays_ anonymous, because if it gets out that he did it this way - well. People will think they understand, they’ll think they ‘get’ him. They’ll think that he’s a coward, and he won’t be invisible anymore. It won’t be ‘oh, that’s just Billings,’ it will be ‘oh, that’s Billings. Guy’s a creep - did you hear what happened at the car wash shooting? Yeah, he was too chicken shit to do anything...’

 

Chicken shit. Okay, Ray can live with that. He’s lived with worse. He presses his back up harder against the wall, lifts the gun to chest height and waits.

 

He doesn’t have to wait long. There they go, the bad guys, squealing off, leaving rubber as they go. The car is distinctive - automatically Ray logs the details; make and model of car, licence plate; height and age of perps, ethnicity, stupid ass clothes that don’t look nearly as cool as those idiots think. And, oh yeah. Gang tats - what a surprise.

 

Yeah, Ray was right not to challenge them, he knows that. He still feels like - what would Benny say - still feels ‘remiss in his duties.’

 

 _Remiss my ass. At least I’m alive._ And he's gonna call it in anyway. Claudette and Dutch are fine detectives. They can make a case without an eye witness - if he gives a detailed enough report.

 

Report. Right. That means he has to go look at the no doubt dead gangster on the other side of the wall.

 

Damn. Ray is sick of looking at dead people. He’s been in this job too long.

 

Still. The job is the job. Ray grits his teeth, turns the corner and looks.

 

Kid is lying on his side, the nozzle of the hose still in his hand. The running water thins the red to pink and washes the blood away.

 

 _Oh, God._ Ray has seen enough victims, enough dead soldati. You would think after all these years that Ray would be used to death, and most days he is. This one though - this one is sharp. It twists up the old scar tissue. It's _pathetico_ \- something about the sight is just so sad. Ray doesn’t know this kid from Adam; he could have been the worst gang-banger. He could have been a choir boy. Who knows? But - shit. Today he had been just some mother’s son, out here, cleaning his car. And now he is nobody, a body cooling on concrete, blood running down the drain.

 

_If I hadn’t been thinking about keeping my cover I might have stopped this._

 

Ray shakes his head. ' _Yeah, or you could be dead too.'_ The voice in his head sounds just like Kowalski. _'And don't you dare fucking die or I'll dig you up and kill you twice.'_

 

 _'Ray speaks for me too.'_ Benny _. 'Not about desecration of the dead, obviously, but please don't die.'_

 

God, those guys. Never shut up, do they? 

 

_'Hey, I got through Vegas, didn't I?'_

 

He survived the devils in the desert, he can survive Los Angeles. 

 

Well, maybe _he_ can't, but Billings can. 

 

He steps away from the corpse, gets in his car and drives away. Ray Vecchio, still, as always, his mother's son, is saying an automatic prayer for the dead young man. Billings, on the other hand, is fleeing the scene. If this gets out, Ray is going to be despised. But hell, it's method acting. If he is forced to become a playable character, at least he's some mediocrity, not Max Payne.

 

He finds a nice anonymous payphone to call it in. 

 

That's what Billings would do. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> If you watch this scene in The Shield you can see about a million emotions going on in Marciano's face when he looks down at the dead body. Just so you know.
> 
> Also, thanks DoctorBane for the great title and all the discussions about Vecchio-Billings.


End file.
